“You’re sure about the fluorite?” asked Grant.
“Sure, it’s fluorite,” sputtered the old man. “The rock is lousy with it. You find lots of it on The Bottom. Lots of old rock here, and that’s where you find it mostly.”
Grant dismissed the subject of the rock and turned his attention to the engine and the tanks. The engine seemed simple in its operation—little more than a piston and a wheel—but it seemed without controls and it ran without visible source of power.
The hopper was a hopper and that was all. Across its throat flashed a ripple of fiery flame that ate swiftly at the block of stone, breaking it up and feeding it into the maw of the machine below.
Grant rapped against one of the tanks with his steel fist and it gave back a dead clicking sound unlike the ring of steel.
“Would you know what those tanks are made of?” he demanded of Gus.
The old man shook his head. “It’s got me all bogged down,” he confessed. “I seen some funny things in forty years down here, but nothing like this. A Venusian feeding rock into a machine of some sort. It just don’t add up.”
“It adds up to a hell of a lot more than we think,” said Grant gravely.
He picked up one of the jugs and rapped it. It gave back the same clicking sound. Carefully he worked the stopper out and from the neck of the jug spouted a puff of curling, deadly-appearing greenish yellow. Swiftly he jabbed the stopper in again and stepped back quickly.
“What is that stuff?” Gus shrieked at him, his blue eyes wide behind the plate of quartz.
“Hydrofluoric acid,” said Grant, a strange tenseness in his voice. “The only acid known that will attack glass!”
“Well, I be damned,” said Old Gus weakly. “Well, I be damned.”
“Gus,” said Grant, “I won’t be able to look at those clams today. I’ve got to get back to Deep End. I have a message to send.”
Gus looked gravely at the cylinders, at the body of the Venusian. “Yes, I guess you have,” he said.
“Maybe you’d like to go with me. I’ll come right back again.”
Gus shook his head. “Nope, I’ll stick around. But you might bring me back a couple pounds of coffee and some sugar.”
Out of the twilit waters came a charging black streak. It was Butch. He had made a flanking movement and now was coming in to get the dead Venusian.
His strategy succeeded. Gus rushed at him roaring, but Butch, hugging the body, squirted himself upward at a steep angle and disappeared.
Gus shook a fist after him.
“Someday,” he yelped, “I’ll give that danged octopus a trimming down that he’ll remember.”
Hart had been wrong, apparently, about the Snider glass, but he had been right, that time before, about the Venusians. For there could be no doubt of it. The Venusians were coming to Earth—might have been coming to Earth these many years, roaring down out of the sky in their ships, diving into the ocean, their natural habitat—quietly taking over Earth’s oceans without making any sort of fuss.
And then Man, pressed by economic necessity, by the love of adventure, by the lure of wealth, spurred on by scientific and engineering developments, had invaded the sea himself. For centuries he had ridden on it and flown over it, and now he had walked into it, embarking upon the last great venture, invading the last frontier little old Earth had to offer.
Strange tales of flashing things that dropped into the sea—strange reports of mystery planes sighted in midocean, planes that had a strange look about them. Planes tearing upward into space or dropping like a flash into the water. For years those reports had been heard—way back in the twentieth century—even in some instances in the nineteenth century, when planes were yet a thing unheard of.
And tales much older yet—tales from antiquity—from the old days when men first pushed outward from the shore, talks of mermaids and mermen.
Could the Venusians have been coming to Earth for all these centuries? Quietly, unobtrusively dropping out of space—perhaps carrying on a lucrative trade for many years with treasures snatched from Earth’s ocean beds. Perhaps even now there were many Venusian colonies planted on The Bottom. That could easily be so, for Man as yet had only started his exploitation of the sea beds. His health and tourist resorts, his sea farms and oil fields, his floral gardens and mines only fringed the continental shelves, and at no point was The Bottom thickly settled. A few depth-dippy coots like Old Gus, spending their lives on The Bottom, caught by the mystic love of its silences and weird mystery, had pushed ever deeper and deeper, but they were few. The Bottom, to all intent and purpose, was still a wilderness. In that wilderness might be many colonies of Venusians.
Grant Nagle pondered the matter as he headed his tank back into the depths from Deep End, back to Old Gus’ dome.
He chuckled as he remembered the result of his visaphone call to Hart.
He could imagine Hart now—cussing up and down the office, ripping things wide open, laying down the law to Washington. By nightfall Hart would have every government submarine in the entire world combing the ocean bottoms.
Combing the ocean bottoms to ferret out Venusians and their deadly little chemical plants where they were manufacturing hydrofluoric acid.
Maybe they didn’t mean anything by manufacturing the acid. Maybe it was for some perfectly innocent purpose of their own. But the fact that hydrofluoric acid was the only acid known to have an effect on glass, the fact that quartz domes had been failing all tied up too neatly to be disregarded.
After all, wouldn’t that be the logical way for the Venusians to proceed if they wished to keep the oceans for themselves. If they wished to drive Earthmen from the beds of their own seas, how better might they do it than by making Earthmen fear the sea, by destroying their confidence in the quartz that made possible domes and submarines and tanks and underwater suits? Without quartz man would be practically helpless on The Bottom, for quartz was the eyes of men down here. In time to come, of course, television could be worked out so that quartz would be unnecessary, but that would be an unsatisfactory substitute—indirect sight instead of direct sight.
And if the worst came to worst, might it not be possible that the Venusians, with their chemical factories, might entirely alter the chemical content of the oceans? The material lay at hand. Fluorite for hydrogen fluoride. Most of the compounds in the oceans’ waters were chlorides—simple to juggle them chemically. Vast deposits of manganese.
Grant shuddered to think of the witches’ broth that well-directed chemical effort might stir up in these depths. A great job, truly—but not impossible—especially when one considered the Venusians might have developed chemical treatment, might hold knowledge of chemistry which was still a closed book to Man. That machine and the hopper and the cylinders—nothing like one would find in an Earthly chemical plant—but apparently efficient. With unlimited raw material, with many machines such as that—what might not the Venusians be able to do?
And it didn’t make a bit of difference to them. In Venus they lived in seas that frothed and bubbled and stank to the high heavens—seas that seethed with continual chemical change. A few chemical changes in Earth’s seas wouldn’t bother them at all, but it would the people and the creatures of the Earth. All sea life would die, men would be driven from The Bottom, perhaps many sections of country lying close to the sea would become virtually uninhabitable because of the fumes.
Grant cursed at himself. “You damn fool,” he said, “creating a world catastrophe when you aren’t absolutely certain of any fact as yet.”
No facts, of course, except that he had actually found a Venusian operating a machine which produced hydrofluoric acid. He studied his chart closely and corrected his course. He was getting close to Old Gus’ dome.